Zone overpopulation

[loramin]

Originally Posted by Drathen [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I'm just bewildered why there is so much push back on uping xp in a few zones.

Maybe because it flies in the face of everything the volunteers have been working on for over a decade, asshole?!?



Just kidding (and having fun mocking forum responses) ... mostly. Here's the thing: you are far from the first person to suggest this idea. Like, if you did a Google search (don't use the forum search, it's awful), and you found the time before the time before the time before the previous time someone suggested this, you probably wouldn't even be back in 2014 yet.

There's a reason it keeps coming up: it's a good and logical idea. And there's also a reason why it will never happen: it's not how classic EverQuest worked. Modern MMOGs came up with lots of great ideas that made MMOGs better (see WoW PvP vs. Red). But in the process, they also lost some of the "secret sauce" that made EverQuest magical.

Project 1999 is all about re-capturing that secret sauce. That's already hard enough as it is (they don't have perfect info about classic EQ, they can't charge for accounts, everyone has internet connections that are 100x faster than they were in '99, etc.). They are not going to further risk losing more of "the sauce" by further diverging unnecessarily from classic EQ, no matter how good of an idea it might be to do so.

BUT, there is a small ray of hope here. The staff will never implement "hot zones", or any other modern MMOG concept. However, the project has a dirty secret: it's ZEMs aren't classic either! The classic ZEMs were fairly well-known (they're built into the EQ Emulator software), and of course the vast majority of live players did not know zone ZEMs (although a few cheaters who used ShowEQ did, and that's how everyone now knows the ZEMs). So the devs decided their own custom, but unknown, ZEMs were more classic than the actually classic, but known, ZEMs.

The P99 staff blocks ShowEQ here, and they've never revealed the actual/altered ZEMs for zones, so all we know is that some are still the stock EQ Emulator ZEMs, and some aren't. So while they'll never announce "we're upping the XP for these ___ unpopular zones" they could do so quietly behind the scenes. In fact, for all anyone knows, they've been doing that for years, and they've just been subtle enough about it that no one has noticed.

But then again, maybe they haven't and ZEMs have been fixed in place for years. Even if that's the case, you can't really fault them. Again, this project is about re-creating classic EQ, and classic EQ had unpopular zones with crappy ZEMs that (virtually) no one went to also. If those zones were more popular in live, it was because of general player ignorance of how things like ZEMs worked, and that's another one of those unclassic factors (far greater player knowledge) that the staff can't do anything to fix here.